@Obe162 tweeted a pic on twitter from the NBA Live 14 shoot http://instagram.com/p/TOsIjaPK58/ and told me that NBA Live will have a huge overhaul & that EA Sports is doing alot of work on it & that they have a whole new team.

We could have guessed that when we found out that they were hiring new lead developers just before the announcement of the cancellation.

With a whole new team ONCE AGAIN, I'm calling another poor attempt at a release. It seems that if a team can't get the job done in one year, EA isn't going to give them extra time. One can understand this since Live releases annually and they are going to need a team that can keep that schedule while releasing a quality product without delays. However, fans are pretty fed up with this, and EA will probably have to lose money for a couple years before they can compete.

Agreed with both Pdub and JaoSming. No, the "new team" thing not only won't cut it, but will only fuel the fire that EA doesn't have any faith in who they hire anymore, after we were being told that Live 13's was a "whole new team" as well. Producers I understand, maybe the last one sucked and didn't manage to get the right line of work done, and so the development went all wrong and out of schedule. But a whole new team? I've been ranting about how wrong that is, and how much time a new team needs to learn the old codebase in order to work on it.

Case in point, I tried to get an interview with a company doing naval management software that was looking for developers, but when they told me that the first 6 months were for the developer to just to get to know how things work and the pre-existing code, I can only imagine that it would take a similar amount of time for a new development team to get to know Live's code.

So no, no new teams. Just give the current one good leadership and enough time and resources to get a good game out.

I'm thinking that EA has some low tolerance for failure with this franchise that has yet to be rebooted. They need a team that can get it done in one year, because that's how often the game gets released. I'm guessing that they aren't going to give extra time to develop a game.

I think the trouble is with the way EA may or may not be managing things. There could also be some animosity or just competition as far as internal developers are concerned. I learned that the developers basically pitch the idea(s) for the next game to management from Elite 11's developers, which sounds exactly like what happened when Tiburon was given the franchise. However, it seems to have backfired quite a few times because those developers haven't been able to meet the deadlines in order to release a game, and EA has said enough is enough, but continues to make the same mistake to continue their business model.

That's right, two years was given to a team to develop a game (an xbox live arcade title at that) that did not come out. First mistake, scrap Live 10 and make from scratch in one year Elite 11. Second mistake, scrap Elite 11, change developers and reboot Live. Third mistake, scrap Live 13 developers and start over...... Any guesses on what is going to happen next year? I've got one.

Notice the trend that is EA's insanity. They keep doing the same thing expecting different results. Thinking back to 1997, they rebooted and the team released Live 08, which wasn't a buggy unpolished game, but it wasn't anything amazing besides the introduction of online team play. The game worked and it's features worked and it had potential, which led to Live 09 with synergy and Live 10, WHICH COULD HAVE LED TO AN EPIC LIVE 11. Until they realize that what they did with Live 08 - Live 10 from the management aspect of building a basic game with a few features and continuing to build on that for the years to come is the only sane route.

I have a feeling that EA won't be releasing an NBA Live game until the nextgen consoles come out.

The prospect of a whole new team is troublesome because of what it's meant for the past couple of re-boot attempts, but I'd like to get the official word on it before I speculate or get too concerned about it.

I'd only accept that if a) they're not going for a release in 2013 but rather a reboot on nextgen, and b) they were actually starting from scratch, not having to work with all the previous code that was left there by (now) 2 previous teams.

JaoSming wrote:Postgame, We can setup a thread for that kind of feedback. To provide clarification, should we assume you guys are able to "copy paste" (I know it's not that easy) features and such from older games, or do you want lists without influence from past games?

There really is no copying and pasting features from the old lives. Animations we have access to but those games ran on different code than what we work with now and even some of the animations will no longer really work from past lives unless we tweak them to the point where it would just be easier (and look better) to mocap them again.

Andrew as far as gameplay is concerned I can honestly say a lot of that we either have or are working on. I will say though that things like customization of controls is something that probably won't happen for a while if ever because of how many bugs are associated with something like that. It takes a lot of time to work the kinks out in feature like that and it will be used by probably less than 1 or 2 percent of the people who play the game. The development time could probably be spent elsewhere more effectively. (it goes back to the feature A vs feature B argument) Multiple controls schemes are a headache but not as bad as someone customizing it. Those might be more likely to happen.

In regards to something like this:

"Gamers also want smooth, fluid animations with responsive controls. Players need to feel like they have weight and a physical “presence”, but not move sluggishly with clunky-feeling controls like they’re wearing concrete boots or running in mud. Make sure users can break out of animations and that the transition is as seamless as possible."

This is the pie in the sky dream for all of us but it is a hard thing to balance and takes time and I'll explain why. Giving people control isn't necessarily diametrically opposed to giving people great animations but it is EXTREMELY hard to have them both. If you want to be able to branch out of any animation at any time you will have branch points in order to have the player transition from A to B. However, if the animation A to animation B are extremely different in how they are posed you are going to get either a snappy non fluid transition or a slower transition that takes away control and what will feel like responsiveness. Our goal is definitely to solve as many of these situations as possible, it's going to require a ton of animation and at times less control which will take time but we are aware of these issues and it is a high priority. It's much easier to plan for CPU controlled players and make them look better than a user controlled player because they can just spam buttons all over the place and have their player spaz out but then you have to ask yourself how much time should we spend trying to plan for end users who want to make the game look bad? Examples of bad transitions that you guys see will be the best feedback in regards to this but just know that we are working to rectify these problems and we are very much aware.

Again though, most of that gameplay list (my area) is either in or in the plan.